by: The MADMAN RantsYes, you're offended! (But the rest of us just don't care...) This is one man's perspective on why we humans do the strange things we do. Maybe you'll agree, maybe you won't, maybe provocation is the point! ;-)

Wednesday, December 9, 2015

We're On the Brink of a Global Epiphany: Terrorists Aren't Religious, Not Ever.

Terrorists actually are never even politically motivated. Not ever.

My
readers already know that my interests are split between solving the
human race's problems and solving 'marketing disruption.' As the former
takes precedence, by just a smidgen, over the latter, indulge me in
re-making a point that is rather pertinent to the entire world at the
moment on the subject of terrorists' motivations. These two words
actually form a non sequitur.

My first blog post seven years
ago stirred up a great deal of commentary. It was an op-ed letter to
the Toronto Star in November of 2008 in response to the sensationalist
and entirely misguided media coverage of the deranged murder of an
elderly Ontario couple at a beach resort in Mexico in 2006 near where I
lived for six years. Titled "Our Developed World Glasses Tend to be Rose Coloured"
(link), I pointed out that, outside of the so-called 'Developed World,'
both the police and judicial systems are largely criminal (run almost
entirely upon corruption).

This means that in the majority of
tourist destinations in the world (and ALL of the 'off the beaten path'
destinations) you are always just a hair's breadth from finding yourself
in a life-altering, mind boggling situation (think of the 1978 movie
"Midnight Express"). Of course problems of that magnitude require some
MAJOR errors in judgement, but they happen all the time in Mexico, often times due to no fault of the tourist, and are virtually never investigated, much less ever solved judicially.

I
bring that post of mine up because it 'frames' the most fundamental
problem that the majority of humans living in their developed world
countries have in wrapping their heads around just how monumentallydifferent
the daily living situation of people outside of our cozy bubble is.
"Westerners" see Syrian refugees with cell phones and assume "They're
just like us in every way because they have a cell phone and the
clothing they have on isn't in tatters!" The "new normal' our brain's
use to filter things through tells us that they should go back home and
apply for a job, like being a bank teller. Here's the bank our cozy
brain wants them to apply to:

When our brains, stuck in our cozy 'new normal,' follow the media's constant, insane search for 'motivation' ("Police are still trying to identify a motive for the mass shooting/bombing/attempted beheading..."), we start to assign motives to insanity because WE ASSUME THE NUT-JOBS ARE AS SANE AS WE ARE!

"Well why would you or I try to remove some stranger's head with a knife? That person must have had a good reason. Sure, their actions were
a bit extreme....but the only thing that makes me feel angry enough to
hurt someone is when my intuitive understanding of the world based on my
religion is challenged....so this individual must have become
'radicalized' by a religion!"

Problem solved! All of the craziness that unfiltered access to the Internet is now empowering and stoking must be
the direct result of an organized religion, just like all the crazy
cult behaviour we are familiar with from the past 50 years going back to
Jonestown Massacre was the result of a pseudo-religious nut-job
preacher gathering a bunch of willing 'lost sheep' and giving their
lives meaning through indoctrination in his lunatic creation of a new
'religious' dogma.

Ah.... But we no longer need a leader to
do this We have the Internet, and on the Internet you can access 1,000
blog posts and podcasts and videos from 1,000 nut-jobs 24/7 virtually
for free -- without leaving your parents' basement. And the videos
don't just feature a preacher TELLING you graphic stories of beheadings
and jihad, THEY ACTUALLY SHOW THE BEHEADINGS IN SLOW MOTION!

My
dear reader, in countries where people are busy trying to prevent their
kids from incoming bombs raining down upon them any second, where food
has gone missing because all the stores and banks and schools are bombed
out and where, outside of the totalitarian regime putting your
neighbour to death on a whim, there never was any real policing or
judicial fairness ever, it isn't too hard to get the most reasonable and
peace-loving able-bodied men to pick up weapons and follow the closest
dude with a commanding presence into battle. What else are they going
to do?!? I'll tell you what else: they try to get the fuck out of there
to try to find a better life elsewhere. To do so they wear their best
clothes and carry their cell phones to stay in touch with their
families, just like you would, Mr. New Normal.

Those able-bodied, average (or smarter!) IQ refugees
are NOT the ones we need to worry about. It's the nut-jobs at home,
many of whom are shipping off to the new caliphate right now, who we
have to be worried about. And here's some news: they aren't religious
nut-jobs -- they're just nut-jobs. They are not carrying out the
political vision of Osama bin Laden to force developed, non-Muslim
majority countries out of Arab countries (he really wasn't trying to do
that, bin Laden was just a mass-murdering nut-job like Adolf Hitler
was). They are not carrying out the mandate for Islamic jihad that some
Imams wherever are nattering on about in order to give them some power
at home.

If you wake up one morning and
suddenly (it never happens suddenly) get the impulse to take the lives
of as many fellow humans as you can, you are not a religious radical --
you're just a nut-job. Humans have become the 6th mass extinction force
on planet Earth because we are a social species who live together by,
as a majority, imposing rules of conduct upon our craziest nut-jobs
members so that the rest of us can live safely and propagate endlessly.
If they don't behave, we imprison, expel or kill them. This social
survival strategy works pretty well until some major nut-job like Adolf
Hitler or Vladimir Putin manages to manipulate our most foolish voters'
instinctive 'nationalism' ("Ours are the chosen, special people!")
into allowing them into absolute power positions. When the latter
happens, to survive and support their families unmolested even the most
peaceful, rational citizen tends to go with the flow, sadly.

So
please stop with the 'looking for a motivation' compulsion and stop
accepting the false (but cozy) notion that these nut-jobs have become
'RADICALIZED.' They are not extremists of one religious or political
belief or another. They are not 'soldiers just following the mandates
of their national army.' They are not 'terrorists' (a label that
bestows the legitimacy of some vague political manifesto upon them).
They are human beings just like that kid next door with sadly screwed up
brain wiring that they were either born with or were traumatized into
through a knock on the head or emotional/psychological torture/abuse.

Once
a pathetic nut-job begins to feel special, included, needed, empowered,
etc. by some asinine cause or another (can be political in the case of
Quebec's FLQ, or Italy's Red Brigade, or Germany's Baader-Meinhof
Gang, etc., or religious/cult-inspired, or cultural/nationalistic in
the case of Rwanda's Hutus & Tutsis, or Zimbabwe's blacks vs.
whites, or a mix of several in the case of Ireland's IRA) their
brains begin the inexorable march toward the dark edge of insanity and
murder (any human who gets a thrill out of extinguishing the life of
fellow humans is, by definition of our social, self-propagating species,
insane). Yes, you can use the word 'extreme' and 'radical' to describe
what their brains are directing them towards, but the net effect has
little to do with our naturally imagined 'causation.' They will go down
this path the moment they get access to an excuse and they will drag
another few fellow sociopathic 'fence sitters' along with them.

We
are now seeing tens of thousands of these nut-jobs adopting the Muslim
religion in order to fulfill the dark impulses of their faulty human
hard wiring and migrate to 'the caliphate' that now encompasses the
north eastern part of Syria and the north western portion of Iraq.
While their numbers have swelled from a few thousand to as much as
30,000 today, there are still only a few of any of the 'supplier
countries'' nut-jobs who have taken the opportunity (and made
considerable effort) to live out their darkest fantasies. In any
population of the world we have a LARGE percentage of nut-jobs. It's
nothing new, it's just the bell curve of human sanity. It only takes
one nut-job to perpetrate a mass killing -- the US has has 353 so far
this year, few of which were committed by Muslims (How are you going to
solve THAT, Mr. Trump?).

To blame one religion or another is
just bigotry. Every major religion, even the commonly misinterpreted
Quran, preaches FIRST & FOREMOST peace and harmony, and only in
short passages (that must be filtered by the realities of the time they
were created -- the entire global human population in the year 0 AD was
about that of modern day Japan) do they lay out prescriptions (probably
written by nut-jobs back then) for self-defense and conscription through
coercion: the threat of death.

'Terror-perpetrators' are not 'motivated' by religion or politics.
These nut-jobs are not 'religious people.' They are not even
'terrorists' (in the sense that they are perpetuating some kind of
legitimate, coherent, rational objective). They are nut-jobs looking to
live out their fantasies of taking underage women as sex slaves (even if
it will be in 'heaven') and murdering/beheading fellow humans,
preferably in large numbers. Their 'motivation' is to listen to the
voices in their heads and do things that none of the vast majority of normal fellow humans want to do.

When
we foolishly (but understandably, given our social nature to nod along
with the majority) legitimize these pathetic nut-jobs with labels like
'terrorist' or 'radical' we undermine the effort we must all make, as
the sane majority, to understand WHAT they are in order to begin to
identify WHO they are. Only once we begin to drop political correctness
(my only point that I have any support for Donald Trump on) in order to
say:

"Sorry. We've figured out that you are a nut-job
and at risk for escalating to the point of killing your fellow humans,
so we are NOT going to treat you with all the respect and freedoms the
rest of us enjoy. You are 'special' and we're going to have to treat
you as such BEFORE you find some bullshit on the Internet to set you
off."

Yes, these nut-jobs are
somebody's kids. Yes, most wouldn't escalate to extreme levels of
'acting out' if they had no access to today's Internet (nor did the
low-empathy bullies who traumatize them in their most vulnerable
years). Yes, our developed world glasses tend to be rose coloured and
we believe it is only fair to 'live and let live' -- BUT THE
LATTER IS THE POINT! These nut-jobs among us are screwed up enough that
they want to act out and kill the rest of us and we are now facing a
FRIGHTENED (not brave) new world where this radical experiment we unleashed on the world to distribute cheap, unfettered and unfiltered access to the Internet through smart phones and WiFi is helping to inspire mass killers to take action. A radical solution is now required, whether we like it or not.

•••

Kevin J. Lenard is a global thought leader in the hotbed of Marketing
Disruption. His insights into how both Fortune 1000 and SMB firms can
pull off the ‘veil of false prophesying’ to expose the diversion called “Social
Marketing” have been leveraged by the most adept and visionary marketers in the
world since he began lecturing and publishing on the subject in 2007.

Kevin
works tirelessly as a Futurist
Consultant and Speaker to help CMOs battle the maestros of bovine excreta who have been shockingly successful in
misdirecting billions of marketing dollars in the past few years.These bewitching ‘Snake Oil Carny Barkers’
have built a vast empire by manipulating the natural limitations of our ability
to embrace disruption during the withering red haze of technological advances
we’re currently working through.Kevin
uses his sagacity, branding expertise and change management skills to guide the
development of core strategies to wean marketers off the snake oil and redirect
their efforts towards truly effective ROI.

Kevin
earned his Masters in Human Insight
Development at the world-renown and exacting School OHK and had his Ph.D.
in Disruption Solutions conferred upon him by his fellow professorial visionary,
Malcolm Gladwell, under the aegis of his 2011 disquisition “Outliers,” in which
he detailed the rigorous accreditation system of the School OHK.The first
chapter of Kevin’s 2006 Masters Thesis on the subject of “The
Evolution of Human Predilections,” was first published online in 2009,
as was the initial installment of his Doctoral Dissertation on “How
Ineffective New Media Hijacked Your Marketing Budget.” He has since regularly released dozens of new
chapters on related topics and now has amassed over 300,000 words in his online
publications.

One
of Kevin’s most valued character traits is his altruism.He has demonstrated his propensity for giving
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Get started down a profitable new
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